Does Pynchon Produce Only 'Masterworks'?

[malignd at aol.com]

Statements like this always make me a little batty.  No other author 
could have written GR because no other author is Pynchon.  But GR is 
not "far beyond" War and Peace or Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time, or 
Moby Dick or Pale Fire or 100 Years of Solitude or .... fill in as you 
see fit.

We all love GR, but this sort of mindless idolatry is the bane of this 
list (and makes me thing you haven't read very much).

<<GR is a work of genius so far beyond what any other author could 
write that it is scary. >>


-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Clavey <antizoyd at yahoo.com>
To: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>; JohnCarvill 
<john.carvill at sap.com>
Cc: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>; pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Wed, Jul 8, 2009 2:21 am
Subject: RE: Does Pynchon Produce Only 'Masterworks'?






Don't know much about structure or themes, don't know much about
geo-gra-phy....no wait....sorry....
(Don't know much about rhyming either...)
GR is a work of genius so far beyond what any other author could write 
that it
is scary. What I loved about Vineland was how laugh out loud funny I 
found it.
z.

--- On Tue, 7/7/09, Carvill, John <john.carvill at sap.com> wrote:

> From: Carvill, John <john.carvill at sap.com>
> Subject: RE: Does Pynchon Produce Only 'Masterworks'?
> To: "David Morris" <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> Cc: "Tore Rye Andersen" <torerye at hotmail.com>, pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Tuesday, July 7,202009, 10:32 AM
>
> People can go ahead and get bored!
>
> I take your point, but I think I could easily conunter your
> argument by saying, look, V. is (structure-wise) just a
> bunch of tenuously connected episodes, jumping randomly
> around from one time period and location to another, and you
> could quite easily shuffle many of the chapters around with
> no real positive or negative effect on the coherence of the
> book as a whole.
>
> If I were escaping the proverbial burning building, and
> having harvested a mumber of other Pynchon books, had to
> quickly grap either V. or Vineland just before I dived clear
> of the flames, it would be a tough call. For what it's
> worth, I found V. an incredibly tough read first time round,
> certainly it was the hardest to read of all P's books, for
> me. A second reading was easier, but by then I'd read ll
> Pynchon's other books.
>
> <<People are going to get bore with this
> conversation, but here goes anyway.
>  
> V's structure kept changing centers, in locations,
> times and main characters, constantly.  The most
> constantly changing character being the many incarnations of
> V. and her myriad of different stories and locations.  And
> one's not too sure that they are one being until the end
> (and even then they can hardly be literally so).  But even
> with all these characters and stories, nothing ever seems
> extraneous.A
0
>  
> VL by contrast, is mostly a chronological story centered
> around one family with numerous flashbacks and a few
> secondary characters and their stories and histories. 
> Seems pretty straightforward to me.>>
>  
>
>
>